Australia’s World Cup hopes go on the line on Thursday night against Saudi Arabia, a nation where football has undergone a recent revolution.
It was an offer Aziz Behich couldn’t refuse. And nor could his club, Melbourne City, who reportedly received a $2 million fee for allowing the veteran Socceroo to go on loan for the final six months of last season, play alongside Cristiano Ronaldo at Al-Nassr and get a first-hand glimpse of Saudi Arabia’s ongoing football revolution.
“We had a few things in common, other than football - you don’t always want to speak about football,” he says. “His mother had had cancer. My wife battled cancer as well. Just little stuff like that. I love my combat sports, like UFC, boxing. He loves that a lot - so he’d come in and Volkanovski or someone is fighting, and he’s like, ‘You see the Aussie guy?’ And he had good banter, to be fair, loved to joke around the change room and that.
But make no mistake: Ronaldo is very much the centre of this particular universe. Everything still revolves around him, for good and for bad. “People around the club make sure that you’re looked after, so you can just focus on football,” Behich said. “Obviously, I was lucky and privileged enough that I was at probably the biggest club there, so think it’s a bit different to some other players’ experiences there.”At the bottom end of the Saudi Pro League’s food chain is another Socceroo, Craig Goodwin, who plays for Al-Wehda, a much smaller club based in Mecca.
The SPL season begins in July, and in Riyadh at that time, the average temperature is 43.4 degrees. It gets better over winter when temperatures range somewhere between 20 and 30 degrees. But when it’s hot, it’s hot - even when kick-off times are pushed to late at night, around 10pm, to try and escape the worst of it.“It was ridiculous,” said Behich. “Even when you train later, it’s just dry heat. Every 10 minutes, you’ve got to stop, clear the throat.
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